Unit 3 Assessment
Learning Outcome One | Realisation
Present evidence of a body of work that demonstrates a systematic enhancement of your knowledge and understanding. (AC Realisation)
I have created a page titled Finished Work that lays out broadly lays out work that is at least resolved at that point in time, if the word ‘finished’ feels a little too tight given the ephemeral nature of my evolving work.
What strikes me most is the what a huge departure I have made from my old work and it is remarkable now to see the sheer volume and variety of work I have made. The paintings feel at the moment to be the least enhanced area of exploration as I wanted to spend my time on the MA striving to break out of what went before - as a ‘landscape painter’ who has fundamentally questioned both landscape and painting, I have found the best approach to deeply interrogate my practice is to significantly move away from both. With a number of pre-agreed shows with galleries I continued to paint and challenge my position on painting here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, composting my ideas into an entirely new approach to working where distinctions between drawing and painting become blurred and where I am shifting perspective entirely, searching for something that fits, looking at the work of others and visiting galleries in person and online. I wrote in this blog post that I feel I need another whole MA to figure out painting so in some ways I have deprioritised painting in favour of a more exploratory approach. Painting is my original love and I will gladly return to it, but the blogging I have done has been padding quietly alongside rather than the focus of this MA.
Whilst I fumble and ponder the big questions of paint and the meaning of surfaces, the greatest enhancement in this context has been the questioning of the landscape as a ‘de facto’ image, where consuming images of beautiful places feels out of synch and unethical in response to the climate emergency. This has been a gradual, tectonic shift rather than a single realisation I can link to a blog post and in some ways this enhancement is the accumulative knowledge of all the dozens of blog posts I have written over the two years. From Year One considerations of what the ‘landscape’ is and what it is made of here, here, here, here and here moved gradually towards something more reciprocal and respectful where I now see place as the interconnectivity of a great many natural systems here, here, here, here, here and here and many more.
I continuing to draw anything and everything and having completed around 1,200 drawings including sketchbooks and kept a drawing journal here as well as blogged here, here, here, here, here and here. Rather than forcing a revolutionary approach with drawing and painting I am observing it closely and interrogating its being, questioning what may remain and what has to go - lines for example are an operational device within drawing that I have deeply challenged when I draw including here, here, here, here and here. I have exploded my understanding and curiosity around what drawing is, what it could be and if there is anything it is not, with research, the Research Paper on Drawing and visiting galleries and exhibitions such as here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
One major aspect of enhancement has been around my own perception of edges, or rather edge-less-ness, where I have begun to imagine fraying of my work, a more sprawling, tentacular, rambling form of drawing, unbound by commercially convenient dimensions that leave the drawing hungry and stretching out searching for more, like rhizomal tentacles and creeping tendrils. I have found this development in my work to be quickly cementing but not terribly easy, as I feel a love and a pulling back to what I know well, although I know the edge-less-ness offers greater enrichment in my work. I have been exploring a quilted format of drawing where fragments are assembled, rearranged and de-assembled here, here, here, here and here. ‘Edgeless’ drawing is satisfying and occurred to me earlier in Year One here and here, although I didn’t really know why at that point.
The area of greatest enhancement has been the experimental work and I believe my pre-2023 self would not recognise itself at all in this new, exciting and expansive work. I am delighted that my work encompasses drawing, painting, textiles, 3D paper making, crochet, video editing and much more as well as creative writing and poetry.
In Year One I began to consider the compost heap as a metaphor for ‘climbing into’ the composition of place, rather than observing the landscape as a barrier, static and lifeless on the picture plane. I started to make drawings around composting, what it means to compost, what goes in and how it may be artistically interesting - here, here, here, here, here and here. I began to consider materiality here and here and here, first making charcoal from the tree remains but then extracting a compost humus, which I have continued to use as a central feature of my work in Year Two.
A critical step for me has been learning to make paper - from lumpy, grey first attempts here, here, here and here I have developed some skill in creating a paper pulp from compost derivatives and recycled paper that I have been casting and making into paper assemblages and 3 dimensional drawings here, here, here and here. After a great many failed attempts and seemingly endless technical frustrations with space to work, accessing knowledge, slow drying times, poor quality pulp, I have started to work with paper firstly with nets here, then sponges here and here and latterly using beeswax and other 3D casting opportunities that lead onto ideas of casting kitchen waste such as cabbage leaves here, here and here and here and here. The reciprocity of the beeswax and paper pulp as described here felt captivating and seemed to embody exactly the sort of mutuality with place, self and other I had been searching for. I have found my relationship to paper is more in its properties of medium and concept rather than substrate and I have explored this in great detail here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. I have begun to experience the genuine sense of reciprocity I had been searching for: particularly the beeswax and paper derived from garden debris with references to food waste, rituals of offerings and ancestral worship has been a deeply enriching enhancement of my ideas.
My work is still ‘finding form’ and the realisation of all of these complex, interconnected challenges has been a huge accomplishment, of which I am immensely proud, but I am mindful that there is still far to go and finding a sophisticated and highly considered realisation of the many avenues I have been pursuing will require continued dedication, time and patience.
I have also experimented with introducing older ideas of indigo dye and expressions of this special blue in my own history of personal grief and bringing it into the frame of a wider, ecological grief, slowly marrying the two or creating a gentle dance around the idea of grief expression and ritualisation. Adding colour to the paper making and casting such as here and here have been visually more exciting as I am not entirely satisfied with brown, sludgy paper casts nor pristine, gallery-ready white, which look beautiful but too austere and ‘clean’, they feel out of keeping with the cyclical, interconnectivity of the work. The point where I have made more successful visual expressions of compost derived paper has signified a leap in progress for me - not only were the ideas making some sense, but the form finding was following suit. I continue to explore how colour, dyes and surface enhancement of the cast paper might work for presentation of these pieces. There is a long way to go with this but it represents a step into a whole different world of possibility.
I felt it was important to continue to push the drawings and began to use sewing as a drawing modality, playing with tensions of the cast paper as entire drawings in themselves and questioning mark making or events within the paper as extensions of drawing or being surplus to the fluidity of cast paper drawings in space - I have found the sewing elements to be yet another whole sphere for future development. Considering the intersection of drawings and diagrams, where I have used stitched lines as another network forming device and I have investigated the punched hole in the paper as more significant than the thread element, which I have found more difficult to incorporate into the practice.
The punched drawings have huge potential for future development and my final show will incorporate some element of punched drawings, which introduce space and light dimensions outside of the flat picture plane. I have explored here what the holes mean as interruptions in the paper plane from early study of Frank Auerbach’s holes in his drawings here and here to deliberate punching into the surface, creation of holes in line formation with their potential for a membranous line in my debates with myself about holes and lines and how they function in the act of drawing.
In addition to exploring materiality to the outer extremes of my abilities, I have also composted the idea of what the Earth consists of and gone underground to explore what lies beneath, with particular focus on fungal networks and mycelium but also interconnected, naturally occuring network systems generally. Whilst I would not say that my work is about mycelium, researching and observing fungal networks here here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here has been the engine that has powered my relationship with place, looking into the more-than-human, the parts of the Earth we choose not to look at, we don’t want to think much about, much of which was inspired by a Sarah Gilespie exhibition in Year One on her lifelong relationship with moths. There came a shift in thinking where I began to see the Earth as a boneyard and here, here, here and here, a memorial place of - not eternal rest - but of dynamic activity and renewal where our deaths are welcomed back into the Earth for the circularity to begin again. My work before the MA rested largely on my own personal grief and I wanted to explore grief in a more collective sense, not just generalised ecological grief but how grief is manifested and ritualised, which forms the basis of this project. Connecting and sewing together personal and collective grief is the eventual hope.
I have kept an open minded about my intuitive sense that flashing lights or fairy lights have a place in my work , as they began to emerge in Year One here and into Year Two here, here and here. This seemed trite and immature but I have kept this desire on the back-burner until more recently where I begun to research bioluminescence as a communication device to signal concerning climate shifts. I looked into light pollution here and glow worms here, here and here as well as exploring phosphorescence in my own work here, here and here. This has taught me not only to trust an instinct, no matter how unsophisticated it may initially seem and secondly that finding a more sophisticated expression of work lies in those little parts of us we notice and respect as our own unique perspective. I find the bioluminescence to be a deeply satisfying and interesting aspect to my work and it seems to pave a way into the natural sciences and drawing that ‘illuminates’ scientific and natural thinking through diagrams, aesthetic empathy and bridge to understanding.
I have evolved theories around kinship and drawing, thoughts and research that meander in and out of all of this work, having not anticipated any of it, an intuitive sense that it was all interconnected kept me looking into all of these things - fungi, kinship, drawing, participation with place, interconnectivity, networks in the ground, brain, lungs, breath, universe. The Research Paper here and subsequent presentation of findings has been key in situating and questioning the purpose of drawing for me through the lens of Dryden Goodwin’s practice of ritualised, compassionate drawing with a socially charged context of air pollution in London, which I was able to discuss with him at great length when I interviewed him here. This new knowledge has given me the confidence to see that my work is becoming generationally important, relevant to the world I live in and that drawing and radical (or stoic) kindness are concepts that represent meaningful strategies for me navigating myself and my work in a state of exception. Evolving my knowledge of stoicism and kindness have been huge advancements in evolving a sustainable attitude towards making art, being an artist and human and Drawing as an Act of Kindness or Kinship here, here, here, here, here and here has become a principle by which I am learning to live and work.
Learning Outcome Two | Process
Synthesise and critically reflect coherently on your process whilst providing evidence of an active, independent and/or collaborative practice. (AC Process)
Looking at my work now, had I read this page or seen my recent blog posts two years ago I don’t think I could have imagined such a seismic shift in thinking and the work I am making. Looking back at my original Study Statement from Year One many of the central themes of my work have remained constant such as grief, place and drawing, but through an experimental approach to process I have explored and gained insight far greater than a theoretical approach and linear process would have allowed. I feel I have pushed my process to the outer edges of possibility for me and I have been very ambitious in my experiments, trying to push my knowledge expansively from complete beginner to a degree of competence in a fairly short space of time. I have taught myself new processes such as paper making and casting here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here among others. I have also learnt to document in journal format such as here and here, experimented with creative writing here, here and here in another way to express and understand my themes and learn basic video editing skills and animation such as here, here and in the three and five minute videos.
The sprawling nature of my work is without doubt one of its strengths, whilst at the same time in the knowledge that I cannot sustain a practice of so many different avenues of enquiry at once... Or at least I don’t think I can. I am learning to make inductive leaps such as here, here, here and here and not worry too much about outcomes, as I had done in the past. I am grateful for the experience of balancing form finding without planning too much, keeping half an eye on how the ideas might be expressed and find form, but keeping my thinking expansive long before they manifest.
I don’t think I could even say what my process is, as it is tentacular, sprawling, frayed and with hungry edges with each drawing or idea creeping out of the previous before I have much chance to hone skills or revisit. This rambling approach to creativity is working well for me as the urgency appeals to self editing: I seem to not give myself time for anything that doesn’t feel directly important and relevant, even if the outcome is considered unimportant, such as here. It is all drawing and an expression of grief, grappling with place in a time of ecological chaos, but the process from which my ideas come is all over the place, in a good way. I make and I make and I make more and whilst it would not be sustainable forever, I feel this is what this course has been about and has taught me an attitude of prototype thinking that will remain with me: make first and then evolve the idea from the making.
The word sustainability is of interest to me and my work and its context: I have worked incredibly hard apportioning respect and time to a great many whims in the pursuit of truth, learning to hone my intuition. This will benefit me greatly, as I cannot physically or emotionally sustain constant searching and I look forward to a phase of greater discernment, which has been one of my main goals and the subject of my very first blog post on this MA. I believed discernment would take me directly to where I wanted to go but in fact it has taken me on a mischievous journey of folly, red herrings and outright disasters, from which I have learnt infinitely more. My work has become ecologically more sustainable in its circularity of materials, moving away from the linear economy of take-make-waste towards something more ecologically positive. Putting my work back into the compost to nourish future expressions is a stage in process thinking I would never have anticipated, where part of the work is the ritual of decomposition itself, closing the cycle of participation in place, becoming part of the interconnectivity of all the systems and networks that allow place to thrive. The wider context of sustainability is also key in terms of the context of climate change and purposeful art making. Whilst many might not see my work as radical or hugely innovative, I feel a sense of engagement with generational issues and a small contribution towards ritualising contemporary, collective grief around damaged ecologies is emerging in my art.
Contradiction is becoming a functional part of my working memory and visual reasoning, as I learn to process complex, inconsistent and often disparate ideas that seem separate in the making process, where synthesis can be slippery and reluctant. Ideas move quickly, process does not, so the contradictions that emerge must be patient, such as using bleach here and here in an otherwise circular and ecologically positive process. There is something there that intrigues me in the bleach/indigo combination but I cannot currently weave it meaningfully into my thinking beyond notions of ruination here and here and death. Acceptance and trust seem to be useful companions in such situations.
I am working towards an online showcase of my Final Degree Show and have been playing with ideas around presentation here. I have booked the local village hall on 20th June to create a practice realisation of the show so I might anticipate hanging needs or challenges and also photograph the work for my records and in the event that I am unable to attend the final show for any reason. I hope that this 'dry run’ will prepare me for the logistics involved, ensure I have all the correct supplies and that my work will look as I expect it to. I have also hired the hall weekly so I can work on the larger drawings.
I am regarding the show as an extension of my wider practice: marking of time, a point of punctuation in a longer narrative of creativity. I hope the work will be diverse and dynamic, which I feel my artistic practice to be currently. I hope it will be sprawling, risky, truthful. These are elements I grapple and sometimes struggle with, particularly as now at the time of writing the larger compost drawing (images below) is decomposing too quickly and whilst I try to allow the drawing as a collaborative endeavour with the garden and Verity I am of course invested in the piece ‘working’ and not falling apart to such an extent that it does not function as an artwork as I see it, or potentially finding ways to use the decomposition as a strength, such as a sprawling, creeping drawing as discussed with Jonathan in my last Tutorial. I am making two more large drawings, one of which is being worked on in the village hall (photos above) and the other is as yet undecided. Ideally, each drawing will offer a different approach to drawing in my exploration of personal and collective grief and participation with the place in which I live.
The final stage in my project as it stands will be a documentation of the breaking down of the paper casting in a see-through bucket where I am creating a time lapse/animation of the decomposition. This is still in the early stages at the time of writing and I hope that the film or series of stills will constitute a meaningful resolution of my exploration of the compost as a metaphor for renewal and new beginnings. Depending on how this goes, this may be shown as part of the final show, if the composting happens quickly enough.
Learning Outcome Three | Communication
Summarise and evaluate your overall progress and formulate a constructive plan for continuing Personal and Professional Development. (AC Communication)
I have created a page titled Finished Work that lays out broadly lays out work that is at least resolved at that point in time, if the word ‘finished’ feels a little too tight given the ephemeral nature of my evolving work. I have also created a page titled Experimental Work as a way of communicating what I have been doing over the past two years, so visitors to my website from galleries to submission assessors might see how my work is evolving.
The process of blogging has been incredibly useful for helping me to focus my ideas and learn to communicate my process and ideas coherently. It has also been a way to document work that would otherwise have been recycled or forgotten, as I have a poor memory and make huge amounts of work that could get lost, as well as capturing tangents that I want to revisit later. I hope to continue to communicate my work through some form of blog going forward, using tags and a tag cloud to keep the conversation with myself going.
My Unit Three video summarises much of my progress so far but the reality is far wider sprawling with tentacles of ideas, processes and explorations extending beyond the limitations of such a short video. The video speaks firstly to my work moving out of the picture plane and into understanding and participation, which is still just the beginning. I still face the monumental task of uniting - or bridging - my older skills and desires with my newer theories and processes, many of which are entirely contradictory. For example I have built up a vocabulary of mark making over the years using oil and acrylic paint and as much as I love the unique mark making possibilities it affords, working in plastic polymer has emerged as an impossibility at this point and alternatives must be found. Similarly line as a central operational tool of drawing has become problematic in my sense of mutuality with an Earth that has no meaningful relationship with hard edged divisions as I previously had imagined and these dichotomies must find a resolution as my work develops going forward. This progress, albeit not entirely resolved, has been hugely significant but yet greater is the vastness of the possibilities it all opens up and the outcomes of this shift will continue to challenge me well beyond this MA.
I have discovered technical abilities in paper making and an expanded field of drawing I would never have imagined possible before this MA and the greatest benefit of this is the learning that anything is possible and I have the tenacity to teach myself anything I want to learn. I have also become vastly more open minded within my own practice and the interesting dichotomy that emerges is that the wider my practice becomes, the more focus and insight I gain. This has been central to my education at Central Saint Martins and was not always clear to me along the way. I am also more open minded about the art of others’, particularly work that I don’t immediately understand.
One of my motivations for doing the MA in the first instance was to look into the world of research and whether this may be an avenue for me to pursue in the long term. The Research Paper has been central to my learning and not only has it greatly informed my own position on my materials, approach and process, it has confirmed a more long term interest in the function of research within and alongside my practice. I have been researching PhDs here quite extensively and following on from open days at UAL, UCL and RCA it is clear to me that I am still a long way from having a well developed research question, or even a subject field but I feel well informed around what will be required of me when the time feels right. I realise that I need to write more to hone my ideas and explore publication options beginning with curation of this blog as a wider resource for communicating my work.
I am interested in conducting some field work in the meantime and I have booked to visit Indonesia at the end of 2025 to learn about indigenous methods of producing indigo and craft techniques in indigo dyeing processes. I do not feel able to return to painting with acrylic as a central medium so I am researching gentler ways to work with indigo and other naturally occurring pigments. I am also researching protocols for non-indigenous persons interacting with ancient cultural wisdoms and I have joined a More Than Human group of UAL students exploring similar themes in their work. The trip is self funded and involves a 5 day workshop learning about indigo from soil to fabric through Thread of Life and I will also spend a week gathering supplies to bring home and explore culturally and environmentally sensitive indigo usage. How Chinese Painting and artefacts of China, Indonesia and India in particular relate to my practice and wider research around funereal and death rituals are still open to research and experimentation and my love of the V&A, British Museum - particularly the Admonition Scroll - and RA will continue to contextualise my childhood experience of such rituals such as here and here now living in a postcolonial world.
My work has centred so heavily around drawing over the past two years and I hope to continue to nurture my drawing sensibilities. In this post I began gathering resources to continue developing connections in the drawing world and I will apply to the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize in June. I continue to run my January Drawing Club, (instagram here) which is a free online community space for drawing with just over 2,000 members, through both paid online drawing sessions but also free opportunities to discuss drawing and share work. I hope to expand January Drawing Club to include many more community based drawing activities, including Pass the Pencil, which I wrote about here, all of which centre around the idea of making kin through drawing. I have also had approval from the Marlborough Town Council to create an ambitious drawing of the town made by local children to be exhibited publicly and hopefully will be sponsored by local businesses and fundraise by selling parts of the drawing to support Council run initiatives for children. I anticipate five 10 metre rolls of paper for each of the schools in the town creating a 50m drawing to be displayed in the town centre. I hope that the project will be an inexpensive way for the town to create a sense of identity and unity, whilst creating opportunities for children to participate collectively in a positive project with drawing at its centre. I look forward to specific dates and details being announced.
My newfound love of paper making continues and I am particularly enthralled by the interaction between beeswax and paper alongside my compost explorations. I am keen to keep practicing my paper recipes to refine the paper pulp process and explore further kitchen and garden waste opportunities. I am also exploring sewing within paper making and I have joined this class here with Richard McVetis and also the Paper Lab Sewing course, which I have not yet started.
Finally my work around compost and soil has been central to broadening my understanding of the Earth outside of a ‘landscape’ image and I have registered for this Artathon: Exploring the Art of Soil with World Soil Museum day on 5th June 2025 where artists are called to make an artwork in response to soil on that day and selected works will be exhibited in the Netherlands and Portugal later in the Summer. I have also submitted my application without hope nor expectation for the Mueller-Lowe NOVA Awards for which interviews commence in June. I am also working my way through this Soil Chromatography course online.
Whilst I anticipate a honing of the above methods and approaches I am also keen to experiment with clay, which I had hoped to start as part of the MA but never quite made it to the top of the list. I anticipate an ongoing relationship with trying new things, experimenting with new approaches and I look forward to a practice that is unconfined by materials, approaches or aesthetics.
Finally, I want to paint again. My first and most enduring love and I can’t wait to get back into my studio. I have two large scale painting shows remaining this year, one with Velarde in Devon, where I showed in 2023 and one with the Sanctuary Gallery in Gloucester, as well as a possible solo in Spring next year. I will be launching straight into making work for that after the final show and I see 2026 as the start of a whole new world.